It’s the kind of thing jazz can do at its best — but something the music may be doing less and less of. Or too often and not well enough. The various factions that make up the jazz world — audiences, musician, writers, plus the teachers and students who seem to be the only groups growing in number — don’t have a consensus on the matter. But the jazz fraternity seems to know two things: Despite continued artistic quality, the audience around the music is dying. And the choice of what songs jazz musicians play — and what they don’t play — may be part of the problem.
Over the past few years, Rollins — perhaps the living jazz musician with the widest knowledge and deepest feeling for standards — has experienced a change of heart. “Jazz standards don’t have the same pull on the audience,” he says now. “I love the American songbook, but people don’t recognize them any more. So I feel we need more original music. Jazz has got to keep moving: It’s important to get new music, new melodies.” During the four weeks he spent in Europe this fall, Rollins played very few standards. “They’re still powerful to me, but to audiences, they’ve lost some of their power.”
The issue of song selection — as central to a repertory-driven art like jazz in a way that it’s not for, say, rock ‘n’ roll, which, since the Beatles, has been about original songwriting — has been talked about for years now. But it all became more pressing lately, with the emergence of several high-profile artists who reject or ignore the tradition of Porter, the Gershwins and Jerome Kern — or even the related lineage of songs by jazz musicians, such as Duke Ellington and Billy Strayhorn’s “Lush Life” or Thelonious Monk’s “Round Midnight.”
There is no version of “Summertime” or “Autumn Leaves” on the latest record by bassist and singer Esperanza Spalding, who is, these days, quite literally the music’s cover girl. She won a Grammy for best new artist in 2011; this year, Spalding is on the cover of DownBeat magazine as artist of the year. She also put out the magazine’s album of the year with a record of mostly originals. The king of jazz’s avant-garde edge is Robert Glasper, a hip hop-inspired pianist whose latest album, “Black Radio,” features appearances by Erykah Badu and the rapper formally known as Mos Def. His earlier, less high-profile records includes some classic jazz numbers, but the most recognizable song on the album is not something by Harold Arlen or John Coltrane, but Nirvana’s “Smells Like Teen Spirit.”
Keith Jarrett — up there with Rollins as probably the only jazz artist left who can fill a big concert hall without guest stars from the rock world — helped revive the standards repertoire during the ’80s and ’90s but since then has moved almost entirely to his own long-form compositions. There are certainly several established musicians who sell records or fill clubs by playing standards. Diana Krall is one of them. On her latest album cover, she wears black lingerie with a subtle S&M subtext, perhaps as a sort of apology for the eight-decades-old songs inside.
The issue has symbolic meaning, because with the dropping out of a shared body of songs, jazz has lost not only its common language – for decades, musicians getting together for the first time could count on each other knowing the changes to “I Got Rhythm” or hundreds of other songs. It’s also lost its emotional connection to its mid-century heyday, when high-quality, greater visibility and a solid canon reigned: Despite all of the warring schools, each of which had its pet repertoire, many of the musicians played the same songs, even if different teams rendered them differently.
And the loss may be more than symbolic, says a controversial recent article in the Atlantic. Ben Schwarz’s “The End of Jazz,” as it was headlined, is in the simplest sense a review of Ted Gioia’s “The Jazz Standards: A Guide to the Repertoire,” at press time the best-selling jazz book in the country. (Full disclosure: Gioia is a friend, and I am thanked in his book’s acknowledgements.) As its title implies, though, Schwarz aims to measure the music for its coffin, as the American songbook — which has not much budged since about 1952 — and jazz fade out like tragic lovers separated by distance. Schwarz sees “no reason to believe that jazz can be a living, evolving form decades after its major source — and the source that linked it to the main currents of popular culture and sentiment — has dried up.” Jazz, like the songbook, Schwarz writes, “is a relic.”
by Scott Timberg, Salon | Read more:
Photo Credit: Christian Bertrand via Shutterstock/Salon
